Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Health and disease are strongly linked to psychophysiological states.
While stress research strongly benefits from standardized stressors, no established protocol focuses on the induction of psychophysiological relaxation. To maintain health, functioning regenerative systems are however likely as important as functioning stress systems. Thus, the identification of validated relaxation paradigms is needed. Here, we investigated whether standardized massages are capable of reliably inducing physiological and psychological states of relaxation.
Relaxation was indicated by changes in high frequency heart rate variability HF-HRV , a vagally-mediated heart rate variability component, and repeated ratings of subjective relaxation, and stress levels. During the intervention, HF-HRV and subjective relaxation increased, while subjective stress decreased significantly in all groups.
Accordingly, both massage protocols increased psychophysiological relaxation, and may serve as useful tools in future research. However, future work will have to determine which of several protocols might be used as a gold standard to induce a psychophysiological state of relaxation in the laboratory. Standardized protocols SPs that elicit specific psychophysiological states in the laboratory offer many advantages. For example, they might prove helpful in identifying the dysregulation of a specific system.
Typically, SPs allow for a a reliable and valid induction of psychophysiological states in a controlled setting, b the study of their underlying mechanisms, c the study of their emotional, cognitive and behavioral consequences 1 , d and the comparability of results between studies and across laboratories, while ideally being time- and cost-saving. As an example, stress researchers use a number of well-established SPs e.
